Well the [sigh] we were being taught relaxation therapy that was it was talking therapy, and relaxation therapy, which when you’re depressed is mighty hard to get started. Once you’ve started and got the grasp of it, then it’s quite good, but to actually get relaxed when you’re really depressed is damn nigh impossible you know.

You cannot relax at all, and I would lie there while this tape was droning on about relax your left knee, your left fist and blah, blah, blah. And I would be lying there like, you know like this…. inside all the time just thinking I hate this. I just want to get out. And then I would feel a failure because I couldn’t do [laugh] relaxation exercise. And that again was very ill matched help. And now if I am feeling a bit tired and tense I can lie on the bed for ten minutes and kind of do a quick skim through of a relaxation exercise and it helps because I’m at a point where it does help, but to force it on people when they are very ill is completely counter productive.

Other things have been very practical things, just breathing [laughs]. I couldn’t believe what a difference that made when the therapist first said to me, “Okay, so try actually breathing in, really you know fill yourself up as far as you can possibly go and then breathe out.” And you think yeah right. I told you about my, that was my feeling about a lot of these practical things was yeah alright mate, whatever. But they work, they work.

What I’ve come to believe is that anger is the tool which people have been given in order to heal themselves and what anger is for is to keep out of your system, or expel from your system, something that shouldn’t be there. You know, for instance if somebody is…they get too close to you, then you feel anyway so you tell them to get further away. Well that’s natures way, it’s giving you the energy to do that. But where anger can be misused when’ but I’ve learned that it can be used in a very constructive way, and I’ve used it to get hatred and anger actually out of my system.

And how do you do that?
It sounds funny that you can use anger to get anger out of you.

A concrete example of what you mean?
Well a concrete example is okay I, I’ve because my mother had a lot of distorted religious ideas, when I’m in church, and I go to church quite often, this feeling comes over me of the stupidity of the Christian religion and a hatred of the other people in the pews with me because they, they’re sort of buying it. But I’m’ but I’m aware of that happening. What I do is I turn the anger that I feel sort of boiling up inside me against the concept about life which I think is partly a religious one which I don’t believe in.
For instance, God wants you to be miserable and I see those words upon like a signboard and mentally I throw things at the, at the board [laughs] and I let the anger sort of go in the direction of this idea. I say to myself, “That’s a lie, it’s a damned lie,” [laughs]. And I imagine myself with a big axe chopping the board up and this sort of thing. Of course it’s quite easy to stand in church or anywhere, nobody is aware of all this stuff going on. But what I’ve found is that it has a magical effect. At first when I did it all it did was it sort of relived the feeling of anger a bit, but now it very quickly, well it makes space for me to just think of these people that are in the church as people, and clear of that [distorted religious belief].

And later on, as I went on, I began to be aware of energy moving in my body like electric’ sort of feeling of electricity. But I did Tai Chi and I could feel the energy. Actually when I got the, a movement right or a stance right, I could feel this, this sort of warm energy sort of coming down through my head and coming up through my feet.

And the actual healing took the form of a Christian liturgy, in the home of a minister of religion, who devoted his time to healing; didn’t have a church. Not necessarily just Family Tree Healing, but to healing altogether. But, in this particular form of healing, he put aside one room so it was like a sanctuary. I was kind of aware of the… what the energy must be like there. And he had a table, that was his altar, and you could put anything of significance on the table. So I put my book of poems, I put a letter I had written, offering up, as it were, what I felt needed to be made whole.

And anything else, I can’t remember what else, but anything can be put there, a crystal, whatever that was symbolically important. The liturgy itself, because I wasn’t actually a church-going Christian, and he knew this and he accepted this, but because they believed in the Christ spirit, you know the deeper meaning of all these outer teachers. That was fine, and the liturgy was able to be altered to suit. You know, I could add or subtract from it to suit. And that… that’s one of the things he does do this man, yes, in Derbyshire.

What did it do for you?

Now, the interesting thing is, on the day that I went there, I was feeling not quite so bad, because by this stage I was on a different drug. I’d been on the tricyclics, I’d been on the paroxetine, which was an SSRI.

I was now on one which is in a class of it’s own, venlafaxine.

Because it was working on the noradrenaline as well as the serotonin and a- I think that’s what of course I’d been needing the whole time. With the adrenaline that was all around my body. That’s my theory. So, I was on that but I wasn’t fully well just yet. But I was, it was one of my better days. And, I had two friends tuning in at a spiritual level to what I was doing, and other people around the country, probably praying for, thinking of me at the time. And within a very short time, I began to get much better. I had one more severe dip down, for a short time, well, two or three weeks. And then, by the beginning of December, I really was getting better, and didn’t look back.

I asked the psychiatrist if I could take St John’s Wort instead of his antidepressant and he said, “Well it’s up to you, but only, but you’ll have to pay for it if you take St John’s Wort.” So I did take St John’s Wort and that seemed to do the trick, and it was at a time of year when this thing about light doesn’t, doesn’t affect you because St John’s Wort can make you light sensitive, some people become very light sensitive.

Another thing when we were there, St Johns Wort was very much under the microscope. And we learned that if you’re taking it [St John’s Wort] with ordinary medication it can be quite dangerous. It can negate anything else or complicate what you were taking. So we had to keep playing the mantra, ‘If you try anything, you must consult your doctor before you do anything, don’t take any, don’t just think well I’ll reduce this existing medication and I’ll take some St Johns Wort because you could make yourself worse.

This is the idea of rebirthing, that you get right back to birth and that you relive this first experience of the world, because you live in this wonderful sort of warm womb environment and then suddenly it all starts happening. And what they say is that the baby must be very confused because the baby’s grown in this, developed consciousness in this warm safe environment and suddenly dragged out to bright cold. I’ve got forceps marks there, that’s where I was dragged out, that’s where they turned my head with the forceps. Yes, so my first experience of the outside world was of somebody sticking some cold tongs in and twisting me out, you know. So Michael thinks, thinks that’s a root of a lot of my anxiety problems, you know. Rebirthers trace it all back to your birth basically. Yes, after a lot of the rebirthing sessions I had felt very relaxed, very confident, very sort of cleared of all the sort of problems, but they do tend to come back , but maybe not as bad. The anxiety problems are reducing dramatically and have done over the last few years, but accelerating over the last couple of years since I done the healing journey course… the rebirthing.

And I’m also trying since about November now I think, about four months, I’ve doing cranial sacral therapy.

And what’s that like?

It’s fantastic.

Can you tell the people what it is?

Yeah it’s bizarre. It’s like a laying on of hands. It’s the therapist will spend half the time cradling your cranium. Your lying on an osteopathic couch, and the other half working on the sacrum, at the base of the spine and it stimulates the cranial fluid to move around and, and basically it’s, it’s to enable your own immune system to, to be boosted if you like so that you can heal yourself. And I was very depressed last year and so I was on very high dosage of medication, certainly a very high amount of anti-depressant at one point, and I’d been able to come off the medication much more quickly and not suffer bad side-effects. And I’m sure that’s because I’d been in this therapy at the same time.

Cranial Sacral. It’s, at times it’s deeply relaxing and at other times it’s quite stimulating. I had a treatment last night and oh I completely relaxed. I went to dream land for a while, and I could scarcely walk when I came out, I was so sort of floaty but heavy. And I’d had a heavy cold recently and it moved a lot of sort of things like sinus fluid around, and it’s just sort of dispersing it now. I feel much better than I have in days, and it really just helps you recover. Because that’s all the treatment I have to pay for separately. That doesn’t come under the NHS.